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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  100 years, 100 great movie memories | Part 3
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100 years, 100 great movie memories | Part 3

To Hindi cinema, with love and exasperated fondness

Amjad Khan in Qurbani (1980). Photo courtesy: Subhash ChhedaPremium
Amjad Khan in Qurbani (1980). Photo courtesy: Subhash Chheda

Nadia

Hindi cinema’s fearless alpha-woman.

By the time Wadia Movietone, a production behemoth in 1930s Bombay that factory-made action and stunt films, met Mary Ann Evans, she had a formidable résumé: horse rider, hunter, circus master and ballet dancer. She was born in Perth, Australia, in 1908 and grew up in Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province in undivided India. She was ready to be a star. Jamshed and Homi Wadia took their chance.

Nadia was first cast as a slave girl in the early 1930s in Desh Deepak. In 1935, she stormed the screen with figure-hugging pants, boots and a whip with Hunterwali. Producers were wary of this film, but the Wadias pushed their luck, and it was an instant hit. The blue-eyed white girl with a whip stood up for the Indian Everyman on screen—the beginning of a one-woman formula and an icon. In Hurricane Hansa (1937), she is an untouchable who speaks up, in Lootaru Lalna (1937), she is a crusader for Hindu-Muslim unity, in Punjab Mail (1939) and Diamond Queen (1940), she is a champion of women’s rights. In later films like Circus Queen (1959), Nadia straddled femininity and bravado with ease. Wadia Movietone has archived her legacy with great curatorial vigour.

Bimal Roy

The real deal.

Rickshaw pullers, murder convicts, low-caste women, haunted men—Bimal Roy’s cinema focused on real people and their universal conflicts. He was famously inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, but his idiom was unmistakably Indian. In such films as Madhumati, Sujata, Bandini, Devdas, Parineeta and Parakh, Roy dexterously wove together realism and melodrama, giving us understated films with shaded characters and complex explorations of moral and emotional dilemmas. His ear for music, realized perfectly by S.D. Burman, meant that he always made space for a great tune. Jalte hain jiske liye, the song from Sujata in which Sunil Dutt serenades Nutan over the telephone, is both simple and sublime, like much of Roy’s cinema.

Waheeda Rehman

A black-and-white star with shades of grey.

She played the dancer, the professional seductress whose virtue is fair game, the corner of the triangle again and again. Each time, Waheeda Rehman did it differently. Like many actors of the 1950s, she had the ability to mine deep reserves of joy and sorrow, to suggest an ocean of emotions churning beneath the surface, a dimension not immediately apparent. She made her debut as a woman with shifty morals in CID. She was a large-hearted prostitute in Pyaasa; an actor wounded by her impossible love for her married director in Kaagaz Ke Phool; a professional dancer in Teesri Kasam and Mujhe Jeene Do; a nurse who falls in love with her patients in Khamoshi; a stifled Bharatanatyam dancer in one of her best films, Guide. In all these films, her intelligence and empathy were as much in the foreground as her luminous beauty, which survived from black and white film to colour. She was no poppet, however, as is evident from a previously unpublished interview.

Ashok Mehta

Light was sacred for this hands-on legend.

Those who have worked with Ashok Mehta say he would always be quietly, furiously at work, hidden under his trademark hat. Off sets, he was a wry-humoured mentor. Mehta’s adventure with natural light spans all genres—Shyam Benegal’s Trikal, Girish Karnad’s Utsav, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Subhash Ghai’s Khal Nayak, M.F. Husain’s Gaja Gamini. The last of the hands-on cinematographers in Hindi cinema whose style influenced many of this generation, Mehta died in August. He directed his own film, Moksha, in 2001. Born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1946, he sold boiled eggs on the street in Mumbai before he became an assistant to cinematographer M.J. Muqaddam. In 1967, he filled in for a Shyam Benegal documentary when Muqaddam fell ill. He worked until 2011, leaving behind an ethos that resisted artificial light tricks and respected the camera’s ability to create sweeping beauty. Revisit Bandit Queen to see his best work—subtle and aesthetically uncompromised.

Nargis

A natural wonder.

As colourful off screen as she was on it, Nargis was one of a kind. Read our essay on 10 ways to regard the 1950s star, best known for her association with Raj Kapoor and her role in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India.

Sridevi

She wears the pants.

Tamil, Telugu and Hindi—Sridevi conquered three film industries with her industry. She started off as a child actor in Tamil films and returned to the screen as a pleasantly plump, plum-nosed adult who displayed sensitivity and intelligence in the urban morality tales and rural dramas in which she appeared. In the 1980s, she moved to Mumbai via Hyderabad, and worked her way through egregious, misogynistic roles that required her to wear leather pants, dance alongside pots and be slapped around by the leading man (usually Jeetendra). By the end of the 1980s, Srivedi had extracted her revenge.

Her nose got sharper, the acting assumed depth, the popularity moved upwards despite her grating, childlike voice (usually dubbed for her by Naaz). She powered movies like Nagina (1986), Mr. India (1987), Chaalbaaz (1989) and Chandni (1989) at the box office. Her off-screen image, of a socially inhibited woman who comes alive only before the camera, was dexterously channelled by director Gauri Shinde in the star’s comeback movie, English Vinglish (2012).

Child stars

A star no higher than the knee.

Child actors have provided welcome distraction from the antics of marquee stars, even if some of them are so annoying that you want to jump into the screen and smack them. They are most trying when they open their mouths to spout profound dialogue. Chetan Anand dispenses with dialogue in Aakhri Khat (1966), a movie that, several years before Baby’s Day Out, lets an adorable infant loose in the city. Curly-haired Buntu takes off as far as his plump little legs can carry him after his mother dies, wandering through the streets of Mumbai and depending on the kindness of strangers to get by.

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Partho Gupte in Amole Gupte’s ‘Stanley ka Dabba’ (2011)

Amjad Khan

Gabbar Singh was only the beginning.

Few actors have both ultra-violent dacoit and effete king on their resume. But then, there have been few performers like Amjad Khan, who was a convincing villain, a charming comic, and a nuanced character actor whenever he got the opportunity.

Two years after playing the arch villain in Sholay (1975), Khan appeared in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari as Kathak-loving aesthete and Awadh ruler Wajid Ali Shah. He laboured away at a time of milk-white heroes and coal- black villains. His crisp diction, imposing bulk and ability to summon deep reserves of nastiness resulted in many seriously bad men parts, including in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), Mr Natwarlal (1979) and Barsaat Ki Ek Raat (1981), and those of dacoits, usually named something or the other Singh, such as in Jwalamukhi (1980). In between, there were lighter roles, such as the wisecracking policeman in Qurbani (1980) who steals the show from Feroz Khan, Vinod Khanna and Zeenat Aman, Kama Sutra author Vatsyayana in the superb Utsav (1984), and the progressive lawyer in Chameli Ki Shaadi (1986) who unites two young lovers.

Rajinikanth

There is truly nothing Rajini can’t do.

Such is the power of the southern superstar that he has inveigled himself into a list that celebrates Hindi cinema.

Rajinikanth enlivened Mumbai cinema in the 1980s with his atrocious Hindi accent, cigarette flipping actions and the habit of whirling his sunglasses in a manner that, like Helen’s dance moves, is better seen than described. His closest rival in Tamil cinema, Kamal Haasan, also appeared in several Hindi films like Ek Duuje Ke Liye and Sanam Teri Kasam, but whereas Haasan was trying to prove a point that he was as good, if not better, than his northern counterparts, Rajinikanth was merely having fun. He sashayed his way through Andhaa Kanoon, John Jaani Janardhan and Chaalbaaz, reprised the glory in Hum, and then had his revenge with the success of the dubbed versions of Sivaji and Endhiran.

RD Burman

Nobody did sexy as well as this ‘Western’ composer.

For most of his career, from 1961-94, the wonder boy of film music was unfailingly accused of being “too Western" and a plagiarizer. His original score in the 1966 Shammi Kapoor film Teesri Manzil shattered every convention that composers and listeners honoured. The gifted son of S.D. Burman set new benchmarks in the Nasir Hussain musical—a sound, unparalleled in novelty and energy. Aaja, aaja, main hoon pyar tera, O haseena zulfonwali and O mere sona were followed by Piya tu ab to aaja (Caravan, 1971), Dum maro dum (Hare Rama Hare Krishna, 1971), Jaane jaan dhoondta phir raha (Jawani Deewani, 1972), Duniya mein logon ko (Apna Desh, 1972), Mehbooba (Sholay, 1975)—these are staggering hits even today. R.D. Burman’s “Indian" outputs in Amar Prem (1971), Aandhi (1975), Ghar (1978) and 1942—A Love Story (1994) quietened his harshest critics. They admitted to his dexterity and understanding of all kinds of music.

Sanjukta Sharma, Arun Janardhan, Kushal Gopalka (a Mumbai-based musicologist and musician), Seema Chowdhry, Chanpreet Khurana, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Shefalee Vasudev and Rudraneil Sengupta contributed to this story.

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Published: 04 May 2013, 12:19 AM IST
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